What a strange place to find those sprites, and what a strange set of sprites to be found in the first place. Makes me wonder if they ever got further with that isometric special stage thing before scrapping Crackers and starting work on Chaotix, and if so, I wonder what the chances are of a later build of Crackers existing somewhere.

I've encountered matches from Space Harrier II, a prototype of J. League Pro Striker 2, and Streets of Rage 3.

Just wondering, how can you find that kind of matches?

I took the final Yu Yu Hakusho ROM and did a hex binary comparison with the prototype to find where bytes were added/removed/changed between the two versions and discovered that all of the leftover data in the prototype is located where null padding data is supposed to go in the final. Using that as a guide for finding where the leftover data is located, I used a binary grep on an uncompressed ROM set folder with about 8-16 bytes from the suspected areas. In a few seconds I get a list of the ROMs that match the data, and I view the region in the resulting ROM(s) to double check. Every result matches the equivalent region in the Yu Yu Hakusho ROM (save for J. League and the later Crackers build).

So has anybody tried doing the reverse search? As in, looking for a piece of Tails' overview head graphics in a ROM set where the prototype "overdumps" haven't been trimmed to look "cleaner"?

I'd say it's entirely possible that there may be more Crackers stuff hiding in the least suspected places.

I'd say it's entirely possible that there may be more Crackers stuff hiding in the least suspected places.

At the very least, it looks like there's a small fragment of Sonic's spindash sprites for the top-down stages - only two complete frames and one incomplete, but they were posted in the TCRF topic shortly after Tails'.

I thought it was undoubutly that crackers was just a joke, because... CRACKERS!!!one!!!

I wonder how the hell did those sprites end in a figthing game though...

They are likely from uninitialized memory. Meaning that, on the PC that built the Yu Yu Hakisho rom, they might have built a version of Crackers on the same PC prior, and thus when writing uninitialized memory, it just resorts to whatever was in memory prior.

Yeah. In more simple terms: whenever you "erase" data on a computer, you aren't actually erasing it, you're just telling the system that it's okay to overwrite it. "Undelete" software actually exists that checks this data and will let you get the files back if they haven't been overwritten yet. ("Military grade" erasure software will actually flag data for deletion and then overwrite it with blank data so it can't be accessed anymore. Some people actually do this multiple times to ensure the old data can never, ever come back)

In the case of this ROM, the Crackers sprites are simply whatever wasn't overwritten yet. These games were stored on test cartridges, which would get data from a PC and write them to the cart for testing on Sega Genesis hardware. That means that, at some point in the past, before YYH was written to the test cart, it was used to test Sonic Crackers, and since the YYH game data was smaller than the Crackers prototype, the Crackers data hung around.

What likely happened is that this Yu Yu Hakusho game was likely dumped from the test cartridge back to a ROM file on a PC so it could be fed in to the Sega Channel system (for whatever reason, probably more testing) and so the extra Crackers data got dumped with it like a stowaway.

In the case of this ROM, the Crackers sprites are simply whatever wasn't overwritten yet. These games were stored on test cartridges, which would get data from a PC and write them to the cart for testing on Sega Genesis hardware. That means that, at some point in the past, before YYH was written to the test cart, it was used to test Sonic Crackers, and since the YYH game data was smaller than the Crackers prototype, the Crackers data hung around.

drx, on 05 August 2009 - 09:02 AM, said:

This is not actually true. There is no way this could physically happen. They are leftovers from the compiling process.

drx, on 08 August 2009 - 06:49 PM, said:

There is no way to erase an EPROM this way. EPROMs are erased wholly. You would have to be very surgical about it to leave holes like that. Plus, these leftovers are always in place of large packs of 00s (padding).